The Third Clark

The Clark couldn’t have scripted the past few weeks any better. Their reopening earlier this month, after a 10-year long, $145+ million renovation that includes the addition of several world-class buildings and launching of a brand new mission, has been getting rave reviews from visitors and the press. I’ve followed the news with a mix of relief and pride. But now that they’ve pulled off precisely what they wanted, what now?

You build a relationship with the museums where you live — even if you aren’t invited to the VIP receptions and press junkets, and even if you don’t bother to become an acutal “member.” You build it by going, by giving your free time through the years, by following what they are up to and why. When I was a student the Philadelphia Museum of Art was a part of my life, even though I only went on Sunday mornings when admission was free. I got to know the Met and MoMA very well in New York because the company I worked for were corporate members, and since I worked weekends I usually had a few quieter weekdays to visit and explore.

I haven’t seen the new place yet — the sudden appearance of New York-level $20 admission fees means I’ll wait until the free offseason (which I hope they continue). But I don’t really need to see what it is like to know it is probably great.

I covered the Clark and the early years of this plan. I saw how the scale of what they hoped to do unfurled, the challenges along the way. The process of understanding choosing an architect who was best known for his astonishing work with concrete, and how that would go over in the beautifully bucolic Berkshires. (Clark Director Michael Conforti was annoyed at me for years because an editor used the words “concrete beauty” in the headline of one of our stories about the project). But also, I was a neighbor. I walked the dog around Stone Hill for years. It was one of the first places I brought my daughter when she came home from the hospital. And I lived for years on South Street, where for years every morning our house would rumble as a steady stream of concrete trucks headed down for a long day’s work.

I think there were through the years some quiet voices questioning whether the Clark could pull this off. Whether the price and the scale would overwhelm what is still not a major urban museum.

That started to fade with the beginning of a drumbeat of good news. I think it began in March, when Ted Loos wrote in the Times about the working relationship between Conforti and architect Tadao Ando, and they pushed each other into what is shaping up to be a great achievement. Something about the way this story came out doesn’t seem right to me. We are going through a moment of serious questions about the role e of “starchitects.” How Calatrava’s buildings are structural duds, how Zaha Hadid bullies and cheats for commissions, on and on. The article felt like it was trying too hard to sell us on the idea of a sensible, down-to-earth architect — a former boxer with an “impish” sense of humor. What I saw in those few press conferences early on fits with the stereotype. I couldn’t tell if he suffered from jet lag or severe condescension. And I’ll never forget the flunkey standing beside him holding an umbrella over his head as we walked around the site in the rain.

He is an incredibly important architect — far better, in my view, than the conventional list of overpriced and over-regarded fashionable names like Gehry, Koolhas, and Foster. And the rarity of his work in America makes this already a major statement and attraction. But beyond the physical aspects, there is also what this means for the Clark as an institution. In May, the estimable Globe critic Sebastian Smee previewed the plans and correctly and gave a sense about the shift in mission and focus we were approaching.

In a time of hubristic museum expansionism, the beloved if rather fusty Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute here has managed something distinctly surprising: It has gotten bigger and better.

It is probably rude to point out how lazy and sloppy most of the piece is. Smith manages to get the name of the original architect wrong, and to describe Pietro Belluschi’s 1973 addition as a “Brutalist monster” is an affront to actual Brutalist monsters (like this, or this!). But even more disturbing is that she seems to have trouble adjusting her vision.

But now, it has been finely tempered into a sharp reprimand of several noxious museum trends, including gigantism, spectacle and pandering to the public. At the least, it should give the most expansion-prone museum directors pause.

Perhaps the ambition isn’t quite Guggenheim scale, but it is still pretty big.This was a very big project, and it irritated quite a few people along the way. The way the Clark quieted its angry neighbors by writing gigantic checks suggests at least a little of that old familiar “hubristic museum expansion.”

The real story here that few people think about is that the Clark is now entering a new, third phase of its life. The first phase began when it opened in 1955, when Sterling Clark, a wealthy twit who spent a portion of the fortune that fell in his lap on an expensive collection of 19th century French art, needed a place to park it for posterity. The clever folks at the Williams art history department convinced him to move it here, apparently in all seriousness because it would be safer from atomic attack than in New York, where they originally wanted to build it. But no doubt, vanity played a key role as well — they’d be just another Frick in New York, but here they’d have a truly magnificent mausoleum for their stuff.

If you see photos of how the museum looked in those first years, it was pretty ridiculous — lots of jumbled period rooms they’d picked out themselves. It was an emporium for showing off Sterling’s pretty pictures, and as such, was a like the Barnes Foundation or the Gardner museum, more about the “genius” and narcissism of its wealthy patrons that gathered the work than the work itself.

But mercifully, that mission changed pretty quickly after the Clarks died. That much maligned 1973 building housed a world-class art history library, and the museum launched a world-class fellowship program and academic program in partnership with Williams. That was the world I came to know and love, a place dedicated to the serious side of the arts, about not just loving the work, but studying it and understanding it. A place famous for its Renoirs and Bouguereaus, that could host thoughtful exhibits about David and obscure Swiss landscape painters alike. It is hard to describe how rare this blend is, and how well the Clark managed to do it.

And that is what had given way to this third thing. Every out of town journalist that has been for lunch and guided tours gawks at how much wider the museum’s scope has become, how magnificent the buildings are, how pleasant the perfect rural landscape is. But when they leave, what about the other questions? What about the bill that’ll come with this — can it actually afford it? in a way that won’t require huge cuts to other programs? will it remain a major global center for the study of art, or just a theme park for New York culture fans to spend a long weekend? will they still have those popular family days in the dead of winter, when kids from around here can do art projects and run around the galleries? what about the summer concert series? or was that just a p.r. campaign ahead of what would be a long and annoying building process?

I’m thrilled for the Clark on this occasion, and for all the people that worked so hard to make this happen. But I’m also a person that loves art and lives in the Berkshires year round, and don’t think it is by any means certain what this new thing means for us.